Bookwitch bites #39

Who’d have thought there could be so many book awards? I can’t begin to keep track of them, but happened to notice Leeds this week. Partly because it has a shortlist that reads like Who’s Who in children’s literature. Well, it should, really. I’m grateful I’m not a young reader in Leeds. It’ll be nice for them to read their way through these books, but voting is going to be hard. To mention just one author per category we have ‘them all’ from Elen Caldecott to Chris Priestley to LA Weatherly. I had a brief look at last year’s award ceremony and it looks nice and properly posh. On the 24th May this year.

Roundabout that time, or slightly later, we should finally come face-to-face with Aurora, Julie Bertagna’s final book in her trilogy. We have waited and waited, but I gather it’s not Julie’s ‘fault’. A pregnancy epidemic broke out among editors, and what can you do? Babies are sweet. I’ll wait, albeit not patiently. I believe they are revamping all three books with new covers to match the one on the right.

Bad things have happened to my blog diary. Someone is not keeping it up-to-date. Could be the same someone who took a tumble outside her back door on Thursday and bumped a little bit of everything on whatever it was. And that bad old knee will never be the same again. I just know it.

Time is a funny thing. That tale of Julie’s trilogy suggests it moves like treacle, but when I saw an ‘ad’ on Sara Paretsky’s blog for the drama she takes part in every year, I thought ‘we surely can’t be there again already?’, so it seems I am as irrational as most of you think.

Post-bump the irritable old thing (me, not Sara) sat down with some comfort reading. It didn’t take more than a few pages of Sara’s Tunnel Vision before VI Warshawski also took a tumble down some stairs.